


Too Late

by Sulwen



Category: Glam Rock RPF
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-01-03
Updated: 2011-01-03
Packaged: 2017-10-14 09:14:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 776
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/147712
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sulwen/pseuds/Sulwen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tommy-centric.  After the tour, he comes down.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Too Late

Home is _fantastic._

Home means long showers and a comfortable bed and no alarm clocks and full control over what to eat and when and lots of TV time and warm sunny weather outside and no suitcases and the ability to walk around naked just for the hell of it (when the roommate‘s not home).

Home also means a fuck-ton of unpacking to do and a lot less hugs and nothing filling in the days, not for a while, empty squares marching off the page on a calendar that doesn’t yet have a place on the wall.

He feels like he’s disappeared off the face of the earth, and it’s awesome for a while. He wraps the solitude around him like a blanket and lets everything go, doesn’t worry for a few days about the mistakes his fingers made yesterday or what to wear tomorrow or all the reasons he shouldn’t eat another slice of pizza. The ever-present light seems to dim, the light of the stage and of a thousand thousand cameras and of a particular bright-white smile. He remembers liking the darkness, but maybe his eyes have adjusted, pupils narrowed to permanent points, because it seems darker than before, deeper. Colder.

He rolls his eyes at himself and clicks “play all” on the DVD menu, but the voices blur to nonsense in his ears and his eyes can’t focus on the picture, looking past it, through it.

He’s been promising himself a thousand hours of catch-up sleep for months now, and for some reason it’s like he’s trying to cram all those hours in as fast as possible. Time goes weird, until he can’t tell what day it is, or even if it _is_ day, and when he catches his face in the bathroom mirror, there’s always red lines from creases in the pillow pressed into one side of his face or the other.

He plays some, does a little recording here and there when people ask. Some days he starts a song, pulls something out of the corners of his mind and picks at it for a while. They get abandoned before they can be written down, and he forgets them by morning, like they never happened.

His phone hardly leaves his hand. He’s home now, and the laptop is easier and bigger, but it feels strange under his fingers. He doesn’t like being plugged in anyway, can’t seem to get settled. He goes from bedroom to living room to kitchen, the phone always a comforting weight in his pocket or cool and smooth under his thumbs. It’s a window on the world, an endless source of talk and video and links with the strangest collection of things behind them. Eventually, impossibly, it seems like there’s nothing more to see, like the whole place has dried up. Dead. Empty.

He finally bumps into Adam at one of those few and far between recording gigs, and it’s sheer chance that it happens in a back hallway, not another soul in sight. He wishes it had been otherwise, Adam surrounded by an entourage, all the hustle and bustle that comes with fame. Instead, they’re alone, and it’s horrible in every way.

There are halting greetings, and there’s a hug that feels like hugging a stranger, and then thick silence. His hands tense into fists and his eyes look away and he feels an unexpected rush of annoyance, because isn’t Adam supposed to be the guy who can talk to anyone, so damn good at this all the time, and if that’s true - and he knows it is - why isn’t it _happening?_

Someone peeks around the far corner of the hall and calls for Adam, who waves them away and then stares for a long, long moment. It’s uncomfortable and strange, and it only serves to remind him of a time when those eyes sent a different feeling through him, when they’d catch the light of the stage and the cameras and send it angling his way, so, so bright.

Then Adam’s mumbling a hurried goodbye, a promise to text more, to call, to try and get together - and then he’s gone, so quickly there’s almost an afterburn of the image on the whiteness of the wall behind him.

Tommy stares until every trace of illusion has disappeared. Then he pulls his hood securely up over his head, jams his hands into his front pocket, and leaves the studio. Outside, it’s drizzling, and the air is thick and close, and he wonders if the whole thing was worth it at all…or if maybe, in this case…maybe ignorance really was bliss.

Either way. Too late.


End file.
